When the Sea is Rising Red (2 page)

I have never spoken to one of the males before—the wray, they’re called—and my understanding is that their House hierarchy puts them on the level of indentured servants. What do I say? I have no idea what the protocol is when speaking to a wray.

“You’ve met my sister,” he says at my continued silence. His faint smile drops away, and he watches me with clouded eyes. Uncertainty has made him flick his opaque third eyelids into place.

“Roisin?” She’s the only bat I know even the slightest bit. A Sandwalker—her House’s star rises even as my own falls. A good acquaintance to encourage, I suppose, although the girl herself is a bore. House Sandwalker specializes in the rare art of perfumery, and Roisin is lucky to have nose and skill, for she possesses little in the way of brains. If it hadn’t been for how our House suffered after the last Red Death wiped out so much of our fishing profit, I wouldn’t even have bothered to know her name.

The bat leans against the wall next to me, and there is a shimmery displacement of air that feels almost like being tickled by a goose feather. “Jannik,” he says, and holds out one hand, as if I were a House son.

He wants me to touch him. We do not touch them—we have pretended some status to the few in Pelimburg, but only because of money. In MallenIve, my brother says, the bats know their place. I know little of MallenIve except what Owen has told me. They still have the pass laws there. Owen approves, and I suppose I should too.

I make it a point to never be like my brother.

With this in mind, I gingerly brush my fingers against Jannik’s. His hand is warm and dry from being in his pocket. A shiver of magic dances between us, then disappears as I let go. It leaves my skin numb and cold like at the start of the flu and I turn my head from him, uncertain of what to say. It’s like no magic I’ve ever felt before and the hairs on my arms rise, tingling. I should say something. The silence between us is strained and awkward, and for a moment I’m certain he’s laughing at me on the inside. A mocking glint is in his indigo eyes.

Normally I’m the first person to bristle at any insult, implied or otherwise. I take my pride too seriously, my mother says. But this time I feel lost, like a ketch in a storm. Something about Jannik has thrown me. It must be because I’ve never had any man talk to me as if I were his equal. Always the men treat us like we’re simpletons to be herded through life, to be humored for our fancies, to be disciplined when we stray. And it’s something I never really thought about till this moment.

For a dizzying instant, my whole world turns about, and an infinite set of new windows opens. I am looking out through someone else’s eyes, and I hear myself gasp. Then the faintness falls away and the ground is once again solid.

I stare at Jannik. His mouth twitches. “I’m beginning to feel like I should be skinned and put on display,” he says.

His words break through my disorientation and I shake my head. “I’m sorry. I never—” Something catches my eye.

In the distance, a familiar silver-gray carriage rounds the street corner. Four surf-white unicorns pull it forward. There is no hiding my family’s ostentatiousness.

It’s my brother’s coach, and if he sees me out here in the dirty streets filled with magicless low-Lammers and Hobs, he’ll find some way to punish me. Were he to see the bat standing this close to me, his fury would be painful at best. I open my umbrella with a snap, spraying Jannik with silver droplets and startling him into jerking away from the wall. “Here,” I say as I thrust the umbrella into Jannik’s hand. “Hide me.”

Amusement flickers across his face as he props the black umbrella over one shoulder and pulls me close. From the road, we will look like nothing so much as two lovers on the street. “Someone you don’t want to see?” he says against my ear. His breath is warm, stirring the tight curls at the nape of my neck. Again, that strange magic flutters against me, in time with his breathing. I have never been this close to a man. He is close enough to kiss. I push the thought away, concentrate on my brother instead.

“Someone I don’t want to see
me
.”

Jannik smells clean, without a hint of the telltale sweet-and-spice of scriven dust, so I’ve no idea where that prickle of magic comes from. I’d expect him to smell meaty, like fresh blood, and not of soap and musk, of amber and perfumes. Perhaps the vampires scrub their skin after they feed. The thought makes me ill.

“My brother,” I explain, trying not to shiver as magic crab-walks down my spine. From the corner of my eye, I can see the rough skin of his cheeks, freshly scraped with a razor. His heart is beating against mine. Despite the tales told, I know that bats are living, are far from immortal, but this is the first time I have been close to one, and it is this patter of his heart that makes it real. He is too warm when I expected coldness.

With every agonized breath I taste sweetness strange and heady. I need to get away from him and away from the lure of this unexpected magic. “Roisin never mentioned any brothers,” I say, trying to change the subject as the clatter of wheels and hooves draws closer.

Wrapped together, we pretend that we are making small talk at a dinner table. “Not completely unexpected,” he says. “I think our mother has made it quite plain to her that we are inconsequentials.” He laughs, a humorless snort. “Yes, Roisin has brothers. Three, in fact.”

Ah, the strange social system that the bats have—so different from ours—that puts the women in power. No one I know has ever seen the matriarch of House Sandwalker, although she’s rumored to be an imposing sort. For a bat.

The sound of hooves on stones is fading now. “Move the umbrella a little,” I tell him.

Jannik complies, and there goes the rear of the carriage, the gray bodywork fading into the mist and drizzle. With a touch of my hand, I motion for the bat to drop the umbrella and close it.

I’ve only so much free time left before my mother sends someone to find me, and I still want to get Ilven a gift. “I should leave—go back to the house.”

“What, after all that subterfuge?” Jannik steps back and looks at me from under his rain-damp hair. “Far be it from me to stop you, but all that hiding behind umbrellas and engaging in nefarious clinches is going to seem wasted.” He grins. He is not afraid to show me his teeth.

Heat rises, flushing my cheeks. Bats do not show their fangs, they pretend they are like us.

Jannik’s face goes closed, and he steps even farther away. He dips a brief bow in my direction. “My apologies.” He turns to leave.

Oh Gris.
He’s mistaken my silence for contempt. Certainly, I’ve never had a bat attempt flirtation with me before, but there’s a first time for everything. And oh, how it would drive my brother insane. “Wait.” I catch his sleeve, the black MallenIve lace of his cuff falling over my hand. Again the magic needles my skin. Wait till I tell Ilven about this—she’ll be so annoyed that she couldn’t meet me.

The third eyelids are back, and he looks at me with white blank eyes, his face carefully schooled.

“Give my regards to your sister,” I say, fumbling for some reason to keep him near me.

“I will.” One corner of Jannik’s mouth quirks up. “May I have my arm back?”

“Oh.” I’m never going to live this down. I release my grip on his sleeve and bunch the offending hand into a fist. His magic slips away from me as he walks down the promenade.

I stare at his back, at the perfectly tailored flourish of his coat, the rain covering the charcoal material with a tracery of stars.

Jannik pauses to stare back at me, as if he’s felt my eyes on him. A gust of wind blows strands of his black hair across his face, and he looks like an ink sketch partly obliterated by the gray rain. With his chalk skin and the milkiness of his covered eyes, he is utterly alien. Compelling.

My throat goes tight, and I can barely suck the damp air into my chest. This feeling, I’ll call it
revulsion
. That’s what it must be, this churning inside me, this ache in my lungs.

He raises one hand and flashes those needle-fangs at me once again. The third eyelids flick up, and I catch a glimpse of fathomless dark before he turns away.

*   *   *

I
WANDER DOWN THE BEACH ROAD
, my stomach somersaulting, my head giddy as I take the long route past the old part of the Claw’s promenade, a place I have only ever seen on the hand-drawn maps that cover my father’s study. Here in this quarter, the abandoned houses are crumbling together and littering the sidewalks with small stones and rounded clumps of brick. The rain is coming in hard from the ocean now, and I can just make out the dark sails of the returning fishing fleets as they scud across the frothing gray harbor toward the shelter of the docks. Usually the ships go out at night, but the look-fars’ storm horn has been blaring all morning, its mournful wail a counterpoint to the wind and gulls. Up on the hillsides the look-fars are in their towers, watching for returning ships, portents of bad tides, and storms.

This part of Pelimburg is slowly returning to the sea. The people who once lived here have long since moved inland, away from the decay, up the hillsides, or farther upriver. You’d have to be mad to stay here now. Most of the houses look as if a particularly powerful gust will blow them right down. Some of them are rotting into the gray mud, sliding inexorably seaward.

“’Ere!”

I step back just in time to miss being clobbered by a piece of rotted windowsill.

“Clear off!” A small dark head stares down at me from the uppermost window of a house with faded green paint mostly chipped down to bare stone and decaying plaster. The girl is as brown as a selkie, and I wonder if she’s a half-breed, if her mother was one of the beautiful seal women who sometimes marry Hobs. “Don’t bring none of your bad luck this way,” the girl says.

Bad luck? While it’s true that I stand out here in my blue silk dress, the storm will have turned my auburn hair into a mess of mud-brown tangles. Fortunately. The reddish tint would have been a giveaway that I’m from one of the High Houses.

My heart patters into a panicked beat. There’s no love lost between Hob and high-Lammer. The Hobs work our factories, sail our ships, wash our clothes. They are the beetle-back on which our city is built. And they do not have a gentle love for us.

I take a backward step.

If the half-breed finds out that I’m of House Pelim, things could go exceedingly badly. Idiots—don’t they understand that without our ships, our scriv-magic, the Hobs would still be living in hunting packs, just barely surviving on what little they could glean from the rock pools? The Hobs seem oblivious to the reality that were it not for our whalers and fishing boats there would be no city, no jobs, no trade.

A little chill of fear crystallizes in my veins. Best to leave before I’m caught and stripped and trussed—and more than likely covered in fish guts—and left as a message to my family and our closed warehouses. How are we to help it that the catches have been small, the fish tainted by magic, inedible? Of course, it suits the Hobs to blame us for such bad luck. It’s blame us or blame a sea-witch, and we make for a much closer and safer target.

“Go on then!” Another piece of rotted wood just misses me. I shrug and turn up the street.

“Keep your trash!” I yell. “I’m leaving.” If I had just a few grains of scriv on me, I could teach the Hob a lesson. Like my mother and brother, I am a War-Singer, highest of the three magic castes, higher than Saints and Readers, and able to make the very air do as I will. Unfortunately, I have no scriv. That makes me terrifyingly weak in the face of Hob violence, and I step farther back, my fear building.

“Keep walking,” says the dark little half-caste. “Or I’ll track you down and burn your house to the ground.”

It’s not the brightest thing to engage them. I really should just ignore her. Besides, what is there to fight over? She lives in a falling-down building that even the sharif couldn’t be bothered to condemn, and I live in a cliff-top mansion. Let her think she owns this little strip of land. There’s no one else who’d want it anyway. I turn my back on her.

It’s far to go before I’m home—I still have to walk past all of Old Town and cross the Levelling Bridge. Darkness is coming in fast as the sea-storm gathers. My sigh is swallowed by the wind.

It won’t be long before I get a chance to speak to Ilven again. There’ll be much to tell her, although I doubt she’ll believe the bat story. She’ll probably think I’m making it up just to entertain her—the way I used to make up hordes of imaginary brothers and sisters to people our childhood games.

I’ll stop at one of the vendors on the way back and buy her a gift. With this thought I skip up toward the center of Old Town to where the market square is in full rumble.

I twist and weave through a crush of people who stink of work and cheap perfumes. It’s so bad that I have to draw a kerchief from my pocket and walk with my nose and mouth covered, in case I breathe in some illness of theirs.

There are wooden tea wagons and wide tables set with fish of all kinds and vegetables and strings of sausages. Some people squat on the ground with their wares laid out on a cloth before them: herbs, seaweeds, carved ivory trinkets.

Not far from me, a gaggle of little Hoblings play skip rope with a piece of frayed and filthy cord. They chant fast and vicious, clapping and shrieking when someone gets caught out.

The sea is rising, one two three,

What will that get for Ivy and me?

Pelim House gave us bones.

Pelim House gave us stones.

When the sea is rising red,

All of Pelim will drop dead.

I rush past them, shaking my head. Little brats. Deeper into the market I go, exchanging the childish game for the clamor of the sellers. And what a racket they make. One shouts out his wares in a high breathless chant, and another calls to me, “Lammer, Lammer, Lammer,” waving at her collection of sea-vomited trash. Bands of ragged children run wild, pickpocketing or worse. Sharif dot the crowd, obvious as diamonds in their starched uniforms. They rake the milling people with narrowed eyes, always keeping watch, policing the city.